Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR3 Review

Specifications and Market Positioning

The HD 5450 retains the basic core layout from the other 5000-series cards but just shrinks the whole thing down to a much smaller scale. While we won’t bore you with a dissection of the architecture, this scaled down design incorporates 8 texture units, four dedicated ROPs and two SIMD engines which each contain 40 Stream Processors for a total of 80 SPs. In this layout, the memory is accessed through a 64-bit interface which may cause some bottlenecks but the lower-end nature of this card means the core probably won’t be able to process enough data to flood the memory interface anyways.


With these specifications, the HD 5450 isn’t a gaming card by any stretch of the imagination. It will be placed below the upcoming HD 5570 making it the lowest-end ATI “DX11” card currently on the market and it will replace both the HD 4550 and HD 4350. One thing that should be noted is that both 512Mand 1GB versions will be released based on both DDR2 and DDR3 memory layouts and at varying price points both above and below ATI’s stated $60 suggested retail price.

To be honest with you though, this new 5000-series card looks like a carbon copy of the outgoing RV710-based HD 4550 but with increased clock speeds. The only difference is that the HD 4550 was listed as consuming about 25W of power at peak while ATI states the HD 5450 needs “on average” 19W.

Below we have a chart from Sapphire which goes over their full lineup of HD 5450 cards and let me tell you; there are a lot of them. It seems that one of these cards comes with a DVI to HDMI adaptor in their accessory packages which isn’t much of an issue since most of them support native HDMI. However, there is one SKUs that supports Eyefinity which means they replace the HDMI connector with a DisplayPort output and without an adaptor, you can forget about streaming audio through your card.